Saturday, March 12, 2016

The Last Minutes of the 2011 Tsunami

Wasurenai is a Japanese map commemorating the lives of some of the victims of the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami. This animated 3d map shows the final movements of 1,326 individuals in the last minutes of their lives.

The blue dots on the map represent male victims of the disaster and the red dots represent female victims. As the map plays out you can watch as some of the victims try to reach higher ground, others head towards their nearest evacuation center and others simply stay at home,

If you select an individual marker on the map you can view the name of the chosen individual and find out where they were heading. When you click on a marker a car icon also appears on the map. If you click the car you can view a Google Street View panorama of the person's location, showing how the scene looked a few months after the earthquake.

The menu in the upper left hand corner of the map allows you to center the map on other locations.